I'm here for a week of fishing by myself. I am limiting my fishing to the eastern side of the park to avoid the crowds.

Had some jet lag so I didn't really hit the stream until 11:30am. I went to ol' trusty Cosby Creek.

I caught a fish on my 2nd cast, right near the bridge where you enter the park. Then about 10 minutes later, I caught another about 50 yards upstream, and I thought boy what a day this is going to be!

A few thoughts before I get to the rest...we need some rain in the Smokies - I've seen Cosby Creek much worse, but it's running low. Being from Amarillo, I always marvel at the rain totals that this part of the country gets. We are lucky to manage 15 inches a year where I live.

But the fact it, it takes 70 inches a year out here to support this ecosystem - the vegetation, etc. So we need a bit of rain to shore things up.

I then went on somewhat of a dry spell for a couple of hours, but the big reason for that is that I was fiddling and fumbling most of the time instead of fishing. Getting un-snagged, falling in the water, fly coming off, etc.

Every time I come to the Smokies, I have to re-orient myself the first day. How to avoid falling, the trees and low hanging vegetation, how to properly tie a fly onto the line, etc.

Anyways...the dropper rig deal caught me one fish, but it's more trouble than it's worth on small water. Theoretically, you double your chances for fish with a dropper rig, but that's "all other things being equal", and they aren't equal:

When you have a dropper rig, you have twice the bugs in the water, but you have 10 times to chances of hang-ups, knots, and lost flies. After two hours fiddling around, I ditched the dropper and went with a dry.

I don't know what kind of fly it is - I'm no fly fisherman - but it has a grey body and white wings, and I think it's a 12. I fished it the rest of the day.

My goal today was to catch 10 fish, and by 2pm, I only had 5 and my goal was still out there, but looked a bit iffy. Then things got interesting:

I came upon a particular run of water, and BAM! One fish. BAM! Two fish. BAM! Three fish. BAM! Four fish! This is very unusual for me - most of the time when I catch a fish in a particular spot, he runs and tells all his friends and that's the end of it. This was pretty unreal. And I didn't hook every strike - there were several others in there for sure!

Three of them were 5-6 inches, and then comes the lunker 8 incher.

So now I'm at 9 fish and things are starting to pick up.

How many did I catch in total? Well, let's just say I left the stream at 4:30pm because I had "fish fatigue" and I was getting thirsty.
I quit counting at 15 fish, but my best guess is maybe 20 fish. And hopefully all of them survived.

The only other time I have caught this many fish in a day was one day in the spring at Tremont several years ago.

I will have to wait until I get back to Texas to post by photos because I left my camera cord thingy back home, but several of these trout were in the 8 inch range, and one quite possibly was 9.

Today I also caught the SMALLEST rainbow that I have ever caught. If he was 2 inches long he was lucky, and it wasn't one of those silvery nasty little fish - it was a rainbow. I actually was back casting and I thought something was hung on my fly and sure enough, it was a baby rainbow. Poor fellow.

I also saw some sort of bat darting around catching insects. First time I've seen a bat on the streams when it wasn't dusk.

All in all, the fishing today was nothing short of prolific. And I'm no fisherman.

I will check in tomorow and give another report. I think I'm heading to Big Creek tomorrow.